The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

  When a fox’s tail increases in length, the ginger hairs on it grow thicker and longer. It’s like a fountain when the pressure is increased several times over (I wouldn’t draw any parallels with the male human erection). The tail plays a special part in our lives, and not only because of its remarkable beauty. I didn’t call it an antenna by chance. The tail is the organ that we use to spin our web of illusion.

  How do we do that?

  By using our tails. And there’s nothing more to be said about it. I have no wish to conceal the truth, but it really is difficult to add anything else. Can a person who isn’t a scientist explain how he sees? Or hears? Or thinks? He sees with his eyes, hears with his ears and thinks with his head, and that’s all. Likewise we create illusion with our tails. It feels just as simple and clear to us as the other examples. But I won’t attempt to explain the mechanics of what happens in scientific terms.

  As for the illusions, they can be of various kinds. Everything here is determined by the personal qualities of the fox, her imagination, mental strength and other distinctive features. A great deal also depends on how many people have to see the illusion simultaneously.

  There was a time when we could do a great deal. We could create illusions of magical islands and make crowds of thousands see dragons dancing in the sky. We could create the appearance of a huge army approaching the walls of a city and all the city dwellers would see this army in exactly the same way, right down to the details of its equipment and the hieroglyphs on its banners. But those were the great, incomparable foxes of antiquity, who paid for their wonderworking with their lives. In general, since those days, our kind has declined rather seriously - probably because we are always so close to people.

  Of course, my powers are nothing like those of the great foxes. Put it this way - I can make one person see anything at all. Two? Almost always. Three? That depends on the circumstances. There aren’t any precise rules here, everything is decided by the feel of things: I sense what I am capable of more or less like a rock-climber standing in front of a crevice in the mountains. He knows where he can jump from one side to the other, and where he can’t. If you don’t make the jump, you fall off and tumble into the abyss - the analogy with our enchantment is very precise.

  It’s best not to exceed your own limits, because a hallucination that is not strong enough to subdue another person’s mind gives the whole game away. The mechanism involved is complicated, but the external result is always the same - when a person suddenly escapes from hypnotic control (slips off the tail, as we say), he suffers a seizure, with unpredictable consequences. More often than not he tries to kill the fox, who is entirely defenceless just at that moment.

  The point is that our sport involves a certain provocative detail. In the non-working state, our tails are really small, and so we hide them between our legs. For the antenna to work at full power, it has to be unfurled. To do this, you have to lower your trousers (or raise your skirt) and spread your tail into a fiery-red plume. This increases the power of suggestion by several orders of magnitude, and that’s the way all serious questions are decided.

  The need to expose yourself could give rise to awkward and ambiguous situations, but - fortunately for foxes - there is one helpful feature to the process. If you can expose yourself quickly enough, the subject will forget everything that he has seen. There’s a kind of twilight zone, ten or twenty seconds that disappear from the memory, and we have to manage the manoeuvre within that time frame. They say the same thing happens when someone faints - when they come round, people don’t remember what happened immediately before their fainting fit.

  And now for the final thing I ought to tell you. We eat ordinary food (fairly close to the Atkins Diet). But in addition to that, we are capable of directly assimilating the human sexual energy that is released during the act of love - whether real or imaginary. And while ordinary food simply maintains the chemical equilibrium of our bodies, sexual energy is like our most important vitamin, the one that makes us enchanting and eternally youthful. Is this vampirism? I’m not sure it is. We simply pick up what the irrational human being carelessly discards. And if he is so profligate that he actually kills himself, does that mean that we’re to blame?

  In some books it says that foxes don’t wash - supposedly, that’s how they can be recognized. It’s not because we’re dirty creatures. It’s just that the excess sexual energy transfuses us with the immortal nature of the primordial Yang principle and our bodies clean themselves through the corresponding influx of Yin. The faint odour that our skin gives off is actually extremely pleasant and reminiscent of Essenza di Zegna eau de cologne, except that it is lighter and more lucid - without that hot, sensuous breath of the mistral in the distant background.

  I hope that now the reasons for my actions will be clearer. And so, I turned on the water, so that my client would hear the noise, then unfastened my trousers and lowered them slightly to free my tail. And then, trying not to hurry, I counted to three hundred (a notional five minutes) and opened the door.

  Popular expositions of the theory of relativity often ask the reader to compare the pictures that would be taken by two cameras - one in an independent system of coordinates and the other on the head of an astronaut. In our case it would be more correct to say ‘in the head’ rather than on it. What would the camera in the Sikh’s head have shown? The door of the bathroom opened and the girl of his romantic childhood dreams stepped into the room. With a blindingly white towel wrapped round her body.

  After she came out of the bathroom, the girl went over to the bed, threw back the blanket and dived under it, blushing ever so slightly: everything pointed to the fact that she hadn’t been in the business long and still hadn’t acquired the professional shamelessness of the trade. That was what the Sikh saw.

  I don’t know if the rooms in the National have cameras set in an independent system of coordinates. The staff there claim that they don’t. But if they did have, then they would have shown the following:

  1. the girl wasn’t wearing any towel. She hadn’t even thought of getting undressed, but merely slightly lowered her trousers, releasing the red plume of her tail.

  2. the girl didn’t walk into the room, she crawled into it on all fours and her tail swayed in the air before freezing above her back in a ginger question mark.

  3. she looked less like a bride than a beast prepared to pounce - there was a fierce, intense look in her green eyes and there wasn’t even a trace of a smile on her face.

  4. since in modern Russian the word ‘bride’ signifies something very close to ‘a beast prepared to pounce’, there is no contradiction here anyway.

  The Sikh looked at me, raised his eyebrows and swayed on his feet. When a person is overwhelmed by the hypnotic shock, a shadow of something like faint revulsion passes across his face, like when a bullet just clips someone’s skull: if anyone has seen the documentary footage of Vietnamese executions, then he’ll know what I mean. Only after my bullet the client doesn’t fall down.

  With a smile on his face, the Sikh staggered towards the empty bed, pulling off his jacket on the way. I waited until he had made himself comfortable in it, then sat on the chair beside it and opened my handbag.

  I’m trying to improve myself morally, and so I avoid looking at the client once the paid time has begun. I feel ashamed even to describe what happens to a man during his encounter with a fox. Ashamed above all for the man, since he looks quite terrible. And a little awkward for myself too, since all this doesn’t just happen of its own accord.

  I’m not writing for the yellow press, so I won’t go into the scabrous details, but simply say that a man’s behaviour is especially unattractive when he starts to realize his sexual fantasies. The fact that he is performing alone increases the obscenity of it to the second power. And if the man concerned is wearing a blue turban and is so hairy that his beard seems to cover his entire body, then it is quite fair to say it is raised to the third.

  Maintaining a
n illusion is considerably easier than breaking into someone else’s mind in order to establish it. Everything is decided in the first moment, after that it’s all pretty routine. But even so, while the client is in the world of his illusions, it’s best not to go too far away from him, because you have to perform the functions of a nurse. As I’ve already explained, looking at the patient is rather unpleasant, so I usually take a book with me, and that was what I did this time. I settled down beside the bed and opened Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which includes a lot of interesting things about various systems of coordinates. I’ve already read the book from cover to cover several times, but I still haven’t got fed up with it, and every time I laugh as if I were reading it for the first time. I even have a suspicion that it’s a postmodern joke, a kind of scam. The very name Stephen Hawking is suspiciously reminiscent of another horror writer by the name of Stephen King. But the horrors here are of a different kind.

  The Sikh turned out to be relatively quiet. He muttered something in his native language and squirmed about in the very centre of the bed. There was no need to be concerned that he might fall out on to the floor. But even so, like a good nurse, I glanced at the patient occasionally. When he got fed with embracing the upper half of an empty space, he started pressing himself against it from the side. Then he moved back to the top again.

  It’s hard to get used to this sight. People have muscular spasms, and at such moments the client looks as if he really is lying on an invisible body. His entire weight is supported on his awkwardly twisted wrists, or sometimes on his fingers. Normally a man could never deliberately hold himself in that position for even a few seconds, but in a trance he can stay in it for hours. Similar phenomena are repeatedly described in the literature on hypnosis, so nobody will give me a Nobel Prize for the discovery. And I don’t need human fame anyway. I don’t need anything from human beings except love and money.

  I have always felt that the means for maintaining eternal youth that has been laid open to me on the Great Way of Things is rather shameful, although I reject all accusations of vampirism. I take no satisfaction in stealing another being’s life force and I never have done. Moral satisfaction, I mean. There is no way to vanquish the physiological aspect, but that is not subject to moral judgement: even someone with immense compassion for animals can tuck into a bloody steak for dinner with his stomach gurgling, and there’s no contradiction involved. And apart from that, unlike people, who kill animals, I haven’t taken anybody’s life for centuries now, at least not deliberately. Accidents happen, but a night spent with me is less dangerous than a flight in a Russian helicopter in conditions of average visibility. People fly in helicopters in conditions of average visibility, don’t they? Of course they do. I’m the same kind of helicopter - only, as Bruce Springsteen put it, I can take you higher.

  And apart from that, I don’t believe that it’s personal when I draw energy from someone. A man who eats an apple doesn’t enter into a personal relationship with the apple, he just follows the established order of things. I regard my role in the food chain in a similar fashion.

  The energy that serves for the conception of life does not belong to people. Entering into the act of love, a human being becomes a channel for this energy and is transformed from a sealed vessel to a pipe that is connected for a few seconds to the bottomless source of the life force. I simply require access to that source, that’s all.

  ‘And now lie on your tummy, sweetheart,’ the Sikh said. ‘It’s time to try something a bit more serious.’

  Anal sex is the favourite sport of portfolio investors. There’s a simple psychoanalytical explanation for this - just try comparing the prison slang term ‘shoving shit’ with the expression ‘investing money’ and everything should be clear enough. Personally, I’m all in favour of anal sex. It generates an especially large discharge of the life force from the male organism, and that’s the best time for gathering energy.

  Setting aside my book, I closed my eyes and performed the usual visualization - the yin-yang symbol, surrounded by eight blazing trigrams. Then I pictured myself as the dark half of the symbol and the Sikh as the white half. A white dot began to glow in the centre of the dark half, and a similar black dot appeared in the centre of the white half.

  The white began growing darker and black growing lighter, until they swapped places. Dilettantes believe that this is the most advantageous moment to disconnect, but I always work with the method known as ‘the bride returns the earring’ - the poetic name given to it in the Middle Kingdom six hundred years ago.

  If you steal someone else’s life energy, it’s important not to provoke the wrath of heaven and the spirits with your greed. Therefore, I allowed the situation to proceed into the phase of reverse development. The flow of energy halted and then turned back on itself. My visualization began changing rapidly. A black dot appeared in the centre of the light half of the yin-yang symbol and a similar white dot appeared in the centre of the dark half. And it was only when the dots had become clearly visible that I broke the energy link and dissolved the visualization in the void.

  After a big win in a casino, the right thing to do is not to leave - it’s better to lose a little, in order not to provoke resentment and anger. And it’s the same in our line of work. In ancient times many foxes were killed purely because of their greed. But then we realized we had to share! Heaven does not frown so darkly when we show compassion and return part of the life force. It might seem like splitting hairs, but the difference here is exactly the same as that between an armed robbery and a privatization auction. Formally speaking, in the latter case there is no crime for the spirits to punish. But there’s still no way you can trick your own conscience, so it’s best just to leave it out of things.

  The Sikh got up off the bed and wandered into the bathroom. When he came back out, he lay down, lit up a cigarette and began speaking in a relaxed voice, telling the pillow beside him some story out of his life. After coitus, men become garrulous and benevolent for about half an hour, owing to the release of dopamine into the brain as a reward for fulfilling their duty. I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. I wanted to finish reading about how a black hole behaves when gravitational collapse reduces its diameter to a distance shorter than the event horizon.

  I thought I could detect an erotic subtext to these astrophysical models, and my conviction was growing that Stephen Hawking wasn’t writing about physics at all, but about sex - only not about squalid human intercourse, but the grandiose cosmic coitus that gave birth to matter. Surely it’s no accident that this great explosion is referred to as the ‘Big Bang’. All the most sacred mysteries of the universe are concealed in the darkness of black holes, but it’s impossible to look into a singularity because it doesn’t emit any light, like a bedroom when the lamp’s switched off . . . Basically, I thought, astrophysicists are nothing but voyeurs. Except that voyeurs sometimes manage to glimpse someone else’s act of love through the gap between the curtains, but physicists have been cheated by fate, and they have to imagine absolutely everything as they stare into ink-black darkness.

  When he’d finished smoking and talking, the Sikh set to work again - he settled on his side and went at it for a long time. The regular creaking of springs was like a soothing lullaby. And I committed the most stupid blunder a fox can possibly commit during working hours. I fell asleep.

  I actually only dozed off for a moment and then immediately woke up again. But that was enough. I sensed I’d lost contact with the Sikh and when I looked up, my eyes met his, staring wildly. He could see me just as I was, sitting on a chair with my trousers lowered and my tail sticking up behind my back. And that is a sight no one should ever see, apart from the mirror and the spirits.

  The first thought I had was that I was facing a Taoist exorcist. This was a totally absurd idea because:

  1. The last Taoist capable of hunting foxes lived in the eighteenth century.

  2. Even if one of them had ma
naged to hold out until modern times, he would hardly have been able to disguise himself as a bearded Sikh with an Oxford accent - that would have been ‘too freaking much’.

  3. Since I work according to the method ‘the bride returns the earring’, Taoists have no formal right to come hunting me.

  4. Taoists never come three times in a row.

  But the powerful fear of exorcists of evil spirits is built into our genes, and in moments of danger we always think of them. Some time I must tell you a couple of stories about those guys, then you’ll understand the way I feel.

  A moment later I realized this was no Taoist, but simply my client, who had slipped off the tail. It was an appalling sight. The Sikh was opening and closing his mouth like a fish just landed on a riverbank. Then, in an attempt to gain control of the body that wouldn’t obey him, he lifted his hands up in front of his face and began clenching and unclenching his fingers. Then he groaned hoarsely several times and suddenly bounded to his feet.

  At this point I finally unfroze and made a dash for the bathroom. The Sikh came rushing after me, but I slammed the door in his face and locked it. In moments of danger my mind works quickly; I realized immediately what I had to do.

  Every bathroom in the National has a red and white cord hanging out of a little hole in the wall. I don’t know what it’s connected to, but if you tug on it, ten seconds later the phone in the room will ring, and a minute after that someone will knock on the door. I pulled the cord and dashed back to the door of the bathroom.

  The next few minutes were rather nerve-racking, while I waited for security to arrive, and shuddered at the furious blows on the door, counting to myself and trying not to hurry. The Sikh was pounding as hard as he could, but I managed to hold him back without too much trouble - he wasn’t a large man.